Cash to create
Academic expertise to the value of £3,000 is being offered via government vouchers to help small firms innovate. Ahn Nguyen reports.
A government scheme that gives smaller companies innovation vouchers that can be exchanged for £3,000 worth of expert help from universities is to be rolled out across England after successful trials in the West Midlands.
According to the
(DIUS) latest White Paper, an initial investment of £3m will be made to provide vouchers to at least 500 small and medium-sized businesses across the English regions to work with an institution of their choice.
The scheme is an extension of the Innovation Delivers Expansion (INDEX) project, which has been running in the West Midlands since November 2006 and is itself based on a programme that has proved successful in Holland.
'Companies can choose from a wide range of academic expertise. The procedure begins with a simple online application, with nothing more arduous than contact details and a brief outline of the innovation your company would like to explore and the type of academic expertise required,' said a spokesperson from the INDEX advice centre based at Aston University. The vouchers are to be awarded on a lottery basis.
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Comment: The UK is closer to deindustrialisation than reindustrialisation
"..have been years in the making" and are embedded in the actors - thus making it difficult for UK industry to move on and develop and apply...